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Review: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

by Jared

May 8, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Tagged: books, Reviews

I started this post while eavesdropping on the bus while a student describes “this great book he read”…I look it up and it hasn’t been published yet. Clearly he has read, or is at least familiar with, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

It turns out that the title of this book is misleading: it only has space to argue that if you talk about a book you haven’t read, you are saying the same things as someone who has. It doesn’t give positive recommendations for how to talk about books and doesn’t say how not reading a book puts you in a better position to talk about it. The argument is as follows:

While reading a book, you’re forgetting most of the detail

By the end of a book, you’ve already forgotten a lot about the beginning. Every day after that you forget more. At what point do you become equivalent to someone who hasn’t read it?

You can tell as much by skimming a book as by reading it

Very rarely do we read books with the rigor of a scholar. There must be a point of diminishing returns in reading, who’s to say it’s not at skimming speed?

What matters about a book is not it’s contents but it’s context in society and intellectual frameworks

Summed up by the joke “you know you’re a grad student when…you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text” – and who are grad students if not experts at reading?

A lot of reviewers believe that this book is satire, but I think they underestimate the realism of a French literary professor. The last point goes along with contemporary literary theory by saying post-structural analysis is better than other ways of understanding a text.

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1. tara

   on May 8, 2009 at 6:56 pm

   “At what point do you become equivalent to someone who hasn’t read it?”

   On a literary blog a while back – but I can’t remember where and I can’t find it – a scholar wrote that he had a “5-year rule.” After 5 years, he wouldn’t talk authoritatively about a book he had read because he could almost never remember it well enough.

   One of my colleagues from my Masters’ class is notorious for talking about books he’s never read. It took us nearly a year to figure it out, but he had hardly read anything even though it seemed he had read everything. His secret is that he worked in a bookstore for years and you absorb a lot of incidental knowledge of books that way whether you mean to or not. It doesn’t hurt that he has all the academic jargon down either.

2. Jared

   on May 8, 2009 at 11:13 pm

   If it took a group of literatti a year in the context of heavy literary discussion to figure this guy out, then clearly his scheme would work perfectly in everyday life. I’m convinced!

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